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Would you enjoy a MMO completely removing RNG

Drop Rate is what I'm mainly discussing here, but I'll put a side note to discuss other things like Crit rate and what not.

I don't think I would. If a MMO completely removed RNG. It'll have to do multiple things to make up for it.
1. Harder content (Usually not "Hard" just increased hp and higher damage migration)
2. Bring in crafting which essentially means "grind"
3. Slow or pack character progression.

I for one, enjoy the diversity that RNG brings. You could usually look at someone wearing a rare set and Awe. Because you think he's dedicated or hardcore.

Side slide:
Now Refining rate and crit rate being gone, would be indifferent to me. As I've played games without both of those and with. I guess Crit rate did make me enjoy it alittle more, so did Refining rate. But once it made too large of a different (League), I started to dislike it.Refining rate is nice sometimes, but things like Dragon sagas 19+ to 20+ only having a .15% chance, made me hate myself for investing so much time into the game.

I'm not much of a PvE'er, and I'm guessing this topic is mainly directed towards PvE content as in any game with PvP you would want the gear to make minimal to no impact or give everyone easy access to the same gear choices to create a balanced environment (as in GW2).

However, just speaking for PvE I enjoyed games that had a great deal of RNG in gear drops. In particular, the only recent PvE game that had kept my interest for a long time was Path of Exile. The drops are incredibly RNG dependent especially the currency drops as you could play for months and months and never see an exalted orb drop. You might see a mirror drop once per year if you are lucky. Furthermore, the pseudo-random stats on dropped gear is also quite fun.

That being said the long term economy in such an RNG based game is terrible because inflation gets way out of hand and doesn't seem to stabilize. It gets to the point where new players can't afford to buy anything. The same item that I bought a few months ago for 3~4 gem cutter's prisms (which I farmed myself painstakingly) now costs maybe 4~5 exalted orbs! The task of farming to gain the currency to buy that item that you want is a formidable mountain.

Ofcourse everyone has an equal chance of having the currencies drop or indeed you might even get the item that you want drop, but one person might get 2 exalted orbs in an hour and another person might get 0 exalted orbs after farming for 3 months. Every mob you kill is like playing a slot machine at a ******. I remember back a long time ago I was basically stuck in Ragnarok Online's Izude dungeon because I was farming for Marc cards which sold for an insane amount of money because they were basically required in WoE and they were so rare. I would get maybe one Marc card every two weeks of constant farming. If you give up after a week of farming you basically wasted a week with no return on your time investment. It becomes incredibly addictive.

yes
**** RNG, in all its forms. even crits. you could do all kinds of other creative things instead of just taking the lazy way out and throwing in a random chance mechanic. some simple 5-seconds-of-thought examples: crit meter. crit meter fills up with every attack (perhaps less for faster attacks and more for slower, to prevent abuse), and at full your next attack is a crit. wow, now you can even use crits skillfully since you know when one is coming. or for drops, fragments. instead of a 10% chance to drop a piece of armor, it drops a fragment of the armor, and you need to assemble 10 to make it. this took me 5 seconds (not counting the time it took to type, of course) so I'm sure a team of people come up with something actually good

removing rng would be worse, i've already experianced this in one mmorpg where the whole community begged the developers to remove rng, the game died immediately because things weren't fun anymore, nothing was worth it in cost and playing the class wasn't as fun as it once was. i guess we just like the slot machines too much to give up on the rng

Killing RNG completely doesn't seem like a good idea. ******** is a variable ratio reinforcement and has the greatest effect on conditioning. (Playing a slot machine for example) It keeps players wanting more and stay longer. If rewards are based on a fixed ratio reinforcement, less incentives are there for players to partake in the activity. Say you get a reward after 5 dungeon runs. Then the prize isn't rewarding. How about 100 runs? Yes it's rewarding but I think people are gonna quit before they do 100 runs of the same dungeon. 20 runs then? Some will say that's too much, some will say too little. There's a gray line between what is the right amount.

RNG is perfectly fine and can feel rewarding as long as the variables are perfectly reasonable. 1-10 is too little and 1-10,000 is too extreme. 1-100 seems just about right because the gray line isn't as great as the fixed variable. This gives players an incentive to keep going because they don't know when they'll be rewarded.

Something like a RNG crit chance is a big no no. You're pretty much depending on chance to save your life. That's dumb.

Killing RNG completely doesn't seem like a good idea. ******** is a variable ratio reinforcement and has the greatest effect on conditioning. (Playing a slot machine for example) It keeps players wanting more and stay longer. If rewards are based on a fixed ratio reinforcement, less incentives are there for players to partake in the activity. Say you get a reward after 5 dungeon runs. Then the prize isn't rewarding. How about 100 runs? Yes it's rewarding but I think people are gonna quit before they do 100 runs of the same dungeon. 20 runs then? Some will say that's too much, some will say too little. There's a gray line between what is the right amount.

RNG is perfectly fine and can feel rewarding as long as the variables are perfectly reasonable. 1-10 is too little and 1-10,000 is too extreme. 1-100 seems just about right because the gray line isn't as great as the fixed variable. This gives players an incentive to keep going because they don't know when they'll be rewarded.

Something like a RNG crit chance is a big no no. You're pretty much depending on chance to save your life. That's dumb.

Not necessarily. In Dofus for example, crit chance starts at 1/50 for most skills and, through gear, you're able to raise the chance to something more consistent (max being 1/2). The crit multiplier is also either 1.5 or 2.0 for spells, so it's not a game changer, but it adds that extra element to character progression.

If done right, I would say that RNG on critical hits is not completely egregious.

As for removing RNG completely from games, as other posters have mentioned, I don't believe this is a solution for an enduring game. Instant gratification is fun, but if anyone has played on high rate private servers before, the fun is short-lived. RNG continues to, more or less, successfully keep players in the Skinner's box, prolonging the longevity of a game.

Not necessarily. In Dofus for example, crit chance starts at 1/50 for most skills and, through gear, you're able to raise the chance to something more consistent (max being 1/2). The crit multiplier is also either 1.5 or 2.0 for spells, so it's not a game changer, but it adds that extra element to character progression.

If done right, I would say that RNG on critical hits is not completely egregious.

As for removing RNG completely from games, as other posters have mentioned, I don't believe this is a solution for an enduring game. Instant gratification is fun, but if anyone has played on high rate private servers before, the fun is short-lived. RNG continues to, more or less, successfully keep players in the Skinner's box, prolonging the longevity of a game.

RNG is good in some areas, bad in others. To completely remove it though, I agree would not be the best notion.
Not to say someone couldn't/shouldn't try to do a rpg/orpg without RNG, just that it would be difficult to do well.

Last edited by Acreon; 05-03-2014 at 12:55 AM.
Reason: Momentary lapse of reason

RNG isn't bad, though a number of games just use it badly on systems that shouldn't have it in the first place. But that isn't the fault of RNG itself, it's the company's way of generating profit through cash shop dependency with the extremely low and absurd rates. This has been known for years and many of you have complained about it in various games. But as long as people keeping praising how awesome the F2P model is and buying into it, this what you are going to continue to see because these games are designed with the nature of the players they make the most money off of and that's the competitive ones. Your personal enjoyment comes a distant second, otherwise things would have been better balanced from the start. The single player counterparts to a lot of these mmorpgs are better balanced and do not have these problems. Though people also go into these games knowing what to expect as well and that is you are going to have to grind to get what you need.

The real problem though is that people just don't want to grind for anything anymore, MMORPG or not. The nature of a number these games are supposed to be in part or whole, random, so it really doesn't make sense to complain about it. You all know what an MMORPG is going to consist of: grind. That has been true pretty much since day one and people keep acting like ya'll are brand new to them. And yet when they implement the ability to buy your gear out of Auction Houses, you complain about how games are now pay to win since all you have to do is just buy everything and not have to, oh right, grind for it.

So you don't want to have to grind for gear based on RNG, and you don't want have to craft gear from rare materials gotten from grinding, or deal with amassing 100s of materials to craft a set, or even have the option to buy gear out of an AH because that's too easy (go figure), so tell me this then guys, seriously: what exactly do you want?

I don't want to hear, "well I don't want grind because I don't like that for x reason(s)"; I've heard all of that before. I'm not even saying any of you are wrong because many of you do have valid points about the various aspects of RNG hindering progress or getting in the way of crafting, but what exactly do you expect from an MMORPG? Or any RPG for that matter? Because to me, it really sounds like you guys are playing Poker and expecting it to be like Chess.

- - - Updated - - -

Originally Posted by Dave!Yognaught

Monster Hunter, 'nough said. That ALMOST has zero RNG to it, though those Rathalos Shells are a real bish to get.

Monster Hunter has a lot of RNG to it. You have percentages for carves, end rewards, certain food ability activations, etc. Hell the gems you need for some of the best gear are just as low, if not lower, than drop rates for items people complain about in a number of MMOS.

And surprisingly, it's still a hell of a lot more enjoyable than all of them.

Last edited by Kashis; 05-03-2014 at 02:07 AM.

Be careful of what you say, tomorrow or today, for the words you now speak, may become the poison your enemies later seek; truth.​"Rules do not exist to bind you, they exist so you may know your freedoms"

RNG is one of those necessary evils, it is the developer's responsibility to keep it under control. Obviously most players are going to dislike having some degree of control taken away from them in any scenario (Loot, Combat, What activity you get to do) but this randomness also helps keep things from getting stale in some scenarios.

While it may not be the best idea to repeatedly layer random systems on top of each other, consider the experience if you removed a mechanic like Critical Hit? In fact lets pull all combat randomness out and take away all forms of avoidance and critical. What you are left with is combat that happens exactly the same every single time. DMG #s are always exactly the same, your dmg - their armor and vice versa. You will know whether you will win or lose the fight from the first swing. You can literally count the number of hits you will take to kill stuff as it is happening because nothing ever changes. Thats not really fun either.